User experience seems to be a thing of the past because everything is in place - is that true?

Symbio's UX/UI Designer Margit Tennosaar is an acclaimed IT mentor and executive. She believes that a good user experience is the basic skill of software business. As a front-end developer, she is not interested in optimized and polished code.
At the end of February 2017, hundreds of UX practitioners gathered in Riga, Latvia. Their goal is to exchange experiences, analyze the current state of UX, and share the future of UX design. The 3-day UXRiga 2017 event was a great opportunity to think about the UX industry.

Emails, phone calls, schedules, appointments, transportation, calories burned, next train delays, next month's weather, neighbors' secret lives. . . There is so much information all around us. Newspapers, magazines, life blogs, information stations. . . And of course the internet. You can find guides for everything as well as ready-made solutions. Michel Tofahrn, director of service design at Fjord Berlin, points out: "We are so good that we are close to perfection". For the new generation, "Google it" is easier than explaining. UX is dying because everything is ready.

Dr. Agnis Stibe, a sociology engineer at the MIT Media Lab, reminds us that it's time to look at user experience in a broader, far-reaching way. The user experience of the future is about making the world a better place. Imagine a triangle made up of attitudes, behaviors, and context (user experience). An edge can affect the other two edges at any time. In other words, we can use the environment to change people's behavior and attitudes. If technology is everywhere, you will never be alone, you have to see the connections and the bigger picture.

As mentioned earlier, we have countless guidelines and best practices for every day and every day. Actually our best experts are real users who always know what design is wrong. Sometimes a solution that is too elaborate can also be a problem. Zoltan Kollin, a user experience designer at IBM's Ustream, encourages manipulation of the rules for a better user experience. Everyone is a designer (to themselves), but the real design work starts when you have to design for someone else. Figuring out what users really want can be a challenge.

Motile founder and Job To Be Done (JTBD) guru Eric M White and Klement Insights principal and founder Alan Klement present a formula for innovation. As always, it looks very simple, you just have to ask "what?" and "why?". For example, the user wants to be able to collect all appointments and emails in one place ("What?"), because he/she wants to be in control of his/her life ("Why?"). Craving is what you really need or want. Is it control, growth, self-expression, identification, belonging, caring, competence or understanding? You need to figure it out and then (re)design your product with the customer in mind. At Symbio, we use the Design Sprint methodology to tell our clients where to point next. Five days of deep thinking and prototyping with the client allowed us to re-understand what the client really wanted. Our Design Sprint team works with innovators, technologists, UX experts, and customers. This is how innovation occurs.

"Be yourself, because everyone else has done it,"

reminds Andy Budd, CEO and UX designer of Oscar Wilde, Clearleft, that everything can be replicated in weeks. But the brand and user experience are hard to replicate. We must understand that design is more than choosing the right colors and fonts. Design is the DNA of your product. Because automation tools can easily generate great-looking designs. What we're going to talk about today is not how the software looks, but how it is used.

Today, there are more than 1 billion websites and countless massive applications, but your only business idea seems to be no longer special, how do you survive in this environment? How to compete with big companies that can copy and own your ideas at any time? Sleeknote CEO and co-founder and chief risk officer Mogens Møller said big companies are rich, but sometimes lack the quality of personalization. The most important thing is not to imitate others, but to find your own unique selling point (USP). Yes, knowing your users is very important, but until then, it's probably more important to know what you can offer? What are your characteristics? If you try to sell everything to everyone, you will end up with nothing.

In conclusion, you have to admit that everything is changing so fast, even the UX design is not the same as it used to be. It's not enough to bring in designers only during the ongoing and testing phases of a project. The role of the designer has changed. Now, design is planning, understanding, identifying, analyzing and improving. Design work is inseparable. Welcome to the age of design thinking. Real users just want to get things done quickly and smoothly. You need UX designers because their job is to find out what users really want.

Yes, the old UX is dead, long live the new UX!